The Internet is still under threat, the SOPA and CISPA bills are threatening the freedom of speech that we are enjoying at the moment. The elderly members of Congress do not truly understand the Internet and are only interested in shutting down the freedom of speech to better control the flow of information that would … Read more
Tech sanctions against IRAN & Siria? It has come to light that Australian government schools that offer take-home laptops are installing spyware on the machines that are allowing teachers to monitor the usage of the machines. This is a clear violation of privacy and should not be allowed to happen. Of course they need to … Read more
Linux Mint and the Unity desktop are compatible, but the Unity interface is prone to freezing and it is nowhere as fast as the KDE 4.7.4 desktop that is a far superior interface that is more useful, you can use the KDE desktop just like the familiar Windows desktop that many computer users are familiar … Read more
To install some nice tiling wallpapers for Debian or Ubuntu/Mint type this command. sudo apt-get install propaganda-debiansudo apt-get install propaganda-debian This will install the lovely Propaganda wallpapers, then in KDE you will be able to use the wallpapers right away. The images are installed in /usr/share/wallpapers. Install some more themes this way. sudo apt install … Read more
This video gives some information about future plans for the Ubuntu 12.10 distribution. Especially the back-porting of Ubuntu 12.10 packages into 12.04 and the Arm support.
The CISPA Bill is a program that will enable more sharing of Internet user`s data to facilitate monitoring of the Internet use of civilians. This under the guise of protecting us from terrorists and keeping suicide bombers off planes. Of course there was the unencrypted data conveniently found in Osama Bin Laden`s hideout, that detailed … Read more
Install gcc from source on Linux Mint 12 After downloading the source tarball for the gcc 4.7.0 release, and unpacking the tarball, enter the source directory: cd gcc-4.7.0/cd gcc-4.7.0/ Then we need to create an empty folder under the gcc-4.7.0/ folder to perform the actual build. mkdir mintbuildmkdir mintbuild Then enter this folder: cd mintbuildcd … Read more
I am using Bing webmaster tools to check the traffic to my website and I have noticed that I had Adobe Flash disabled and the lovely charts and graphs rendered by the web page still display. Google Analytics also works without flash. Annoyingly, Google Adsense does not work without flash when displaying graphs to the … Read more
This is a nice little program I wrote ages ago. /* * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify * it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by * the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or * (at your option) any later … Read more
I recently installed the firmware-linux-nonfree package on my Debian Squeeze installation and after a re-boot, the USB keyboard and mouse has stopped working. Even my old PS2 mouse would not work. I have chrooted into my Debian installation from Linux Mint 12 and after looking in the /var/cache/apt/archives folder, I have found the name of … Read more
The ASIO spy agency is asking Australian ISPs to log all the data that travels to and fro from a users computer. This would require an astronomical amount of storage space if this is to be taken literally. But they are just interested in fighting terrorism by monitoring all Internet traffic that passes through Australian … Read more
The magic SysRQ key combination is used to reset the Linux system if nothing else will work. To use this key combination, press: Alt+SysRQ then tap these keys in order: R, S, E, I, U, B. This will perform a safe re-boot of your Linux system assuming the Magic SysRQ keys are enabled in your … Read more
The Linux Mint 13 distribution will have a nicer desktop interface than the Ubuntu distribution that goes without saying; I have just loaded up Linux Mint 12 for a quick look at the Cinnamon desktop and it is very nice to use indeed, the hotspot at the top left of the screen that is very … Read more
After testing out Mandrake Linux 9.2 in Virtualbox, I am amazed at how fast this Linux distribution is on modern hardware. Sure it is emulated with 512 megabytes of RAM and a 4 gigabyte hard disk in the Virtualbox machine, but 512 megabytes of memory is a lot for such an old Linux distribution like … Read more
View information about your user on a Linux system The groups command displays the list of groups that your user is a member of. [neo@deusexmachina]:~> groups neo cdrom floppy audio dip video plugdev bluetooth scanner netdev[neo@deusexmachina]:~> groups neo cdrom floppy audio dip video plugdev bluetooth scanner netdev Using the id command will display a more … Read more
The me-tv package is not working properly in Debian Squeeze. It loads up but the window will not respond to input, therefore you can not control the application to change channels or the volume. So I am using my digital set-top box connected to the tv card input instead. Below is the command that I … Read more
The colonization of the planet Mars will not be a quick process despite movies like Red Planet that displayed a terraforming method that used algae to create oxygen in the atmosphere. That could work, but it would not be a very fast process. With the recent announcement of plans for asteroid mining sometime in the … Read more